Sacrifice
by DuchessOfDementia
Summary: It had only happened once. But once was all it took. Rennac/L'Arachel, Ephraim/L'Arachel


Rennac's visits to Castle Rausten were rare. As an envoy of the Carcinoan senate, however, they could hardly be avoided.

In the two years since his resignation from Rausten's service, he had visited only three times. And each time had been as brief and as impersonal as he could make it—but when he was a friend of the queen, and a queen such as _her_, there simply was no way around the attention.

On his visits, he would lodge in fabulous rooms and dine with the royal family. If he tried to leave earlier than was necessary, he could expect an argument from the good queen Rausten, as well as the insistence that he stay for 'just one more day.'

He didn't know how much longer he could do it. He didn't think he could stand another meal sitting opposite her and her beloved husband. He didn't even want to imagine what it would be like when their child would be old enough to join them…

He jerked guiltily at the thought, wincing. Guilt…so much guilt it made his chest hurt. The guilt had to stop _sometime_, didn't it? He often wondered if it would ever go away.

It had only been that one time, but it had been enough.

"Rennac."

He whirled around at the sound of his name, and her voice. She was standing in the frame of the entryway to the garden where he was currently brooding, her hair loose and her skin radiant as always. But something drew his attention ever more than her natural beauty. It was the infant slumbering in her arms.

She approached him slowly, her eyes never straying from the child's face and the skirt of her pale nightgown dragging along the garden path. It was nearly noon, but he supposed it was excusable for her to still be in nightclothes. She was nursing a child, after all; and in any case, it wasn't like her husband would have any objections. He always let her do whatever made her happy.

She sat down beside him, finally looking up from the babe to beam at him. "I finally got Michael to sleep," she whispered happily. Rennac took a short, quiet breath to steel himself before he leaned in to peer at the infant's face.

This hurt. Every. Single. Time.

Rennac looked at the gentle curve of the baby's jaw, and the way his fat little fist was curved over his mouth. The child looked different from the last time Rennac had seen him—his skin has lost the fleshy pinkness of a newborn and taken on a healthy, pale yellow color. On the top of his head was a small crop of chestnut hair, messy from sleep. Much as he tried not to, Rennac couldn't but smile.

"He's usually so restless," she said gently, her sooty lashes low as she stared lovingly down at her child. "He gets that from his father, I think."

Rennac couldn't keep his head from snapping up at the comment, though she didn't seem to notice. She continued to fawn over the beautiful little boy, unaware of the pain she was inflicting on the man beside her.

"Yeah," Rennac agreed hoarsely. "Must be where he gets it."

xxxxxx

_He wasn't sure whether he was supposed to be amused or annoyed by her drunken stumbling. She was usually such an upright, graceful creature, but here she was, stumbling over her own feet as he attempted to help her back to her room._

_The end of the war saw weddings. _Lots_ of weddings. And this was just one in a series; Princess Tana and General Cormag's. _

_He hadn't been surprised with her flamboyant actions, her exaggerated well-wishes to the new couple or her flashy wedding gift. Sure, he might have been a _little_ surprised that she chose to spend most of the night dancing with him instead of her fiancé, but then again, he had had to leave early anyway for some military thing or another. She had reasoned that they would have plenty of time to spend together a week from now, when they would have their own wedding. It was a date Rennac tried not to think about._

_What had surprised him most of all was her rather eager consumption of the bridal ale. The couple hardly drank it themselves, and most of the wedding guests did not drink too much of the stuff, given its strength. He remembered the way his eyes had widened as he watched her empty and refill her stein numerous times. Who knew that the pious Princess of Rausten could drink like a sailor?_

_Evidently, she couldn't hold her alcohol as well as she could put it away, he thought wryly as he helped her up a stairwell of Castle Grado, her arm slung over his shoulder and his own arm curled around her waist. _

_When they reached her room, she wasted no time in sailing back against her bed, landing with a contented sigh. He watched her for a moment, the way some of her hair had come loose and fanned around her head like a peridot halo. She stayed like that for a brief handful of seconds before slowly sitting up again. When she looked at him she got a tiny smile on her face. _

"_Hey, Rennac," she said, nodding at him. "C'mere."_

_He hesitated, but obliged her, sitting down next to her. She chewed her lip against a drunken smile, and he felt a wave of guilt wash over him, swallowing him and torturing him over all the things he desired from the situation. _

_And then her smile faded and she stared at him, and her eyes kept flickering to his lips and then back again. And their faces were so close and then he was kissing her, and it was everything, his whole world, everything he'd wanted._

_He kissed her lips swollen, then moved to kiss her neck, her shoulders, her fingers. His hands shook as he yanked her clothes from her, and she stared at him, her eyes dazed and brilliantly green._

_He didn't deserve this, but somehow that didn't stop him. She was beautiful, warm and soft and crying out, and somehow the name she called for changed by the time it reached his ears. He kissed her fiercely while they coupled, and realized, when she delivered a hard bite to his lower lip and a small cry escaped her lips, that he had taken more from her than her intended. But she urged him to continue, and so he did, and after what seemed like eons, he finished deep inside her and collapsed. It was then that her lips parted, and her voice spoke sweetly into his ear. She said only one thing._

"_Ephraim…"_

_He had stiffened at the name, his body chilling with terrible realization. Lifting his head, he looked down at her, her expression peaceful and content, already fast asleep. _

_He realized, with a quiet kind of horror, what he had done. He had slept with her, his princess, his employer, when she had never slept with anyone before. Worse, when she was engaged to a man that she loved, and even worse, when she had thought that he had been that man. _

_He cleaned up as best he could, redressing her and undoing any evidence that he had been there at all. He did not bother to stay the night; he left the tower, continued to the stable and rode back to Carcino, feeling cold and more alone than he ever had before. _

_A month later, his heart had stopped when he heard that she was pregnant. _

_He tried to calm himself by reasoning. L'Arachel and Ephraim were married—there was nothing out of the ordinary about her becoming pregnant. It just meant that their marriage was a loving and successful one, and that was that. Rennac told himself that the child would come out with some combination of Ephraim's hair or eyes and that would be the end of it. But somewhere, in a darker part of him, he thought of possibilities. _

_He had made the decision early on that he didn't want to be there when she delivered, if only for his own sake. But his new position as an ambassador of Carcino meant that he would go whether he wanted to or not, to convey congratulations and diplomatic friendship to the new parents. And so he awaited the due date with a tentative terror._

_When the news arrived that the queen had given birth to a healthy son, he felt cold, numb. _

_He took his time getting to Rausten, showing up two weeks after the birth when the trip would have normally taken a maximum of three days. He could still remember seeing her, aglow with joy as she cradled her newborn, blissfully unaware of all else. He knew, then, that she truly did not remember anything, for she greeted Rennac with the widest of smiles and a quick peck on the cheek, going on and on about how the child looked so much like Ephraim._

_He remembered the empty feeling in his stomach when she sat the baby upright in her arms, and he noticed a mole on the back of its neck. He remembered unconsciously reaching up to touch the back of his own neck, where an identical mole had been all his life. The same one that his father had, and his grandfather._

_His second visit was six months later, and he was horrified to see the child was growing brown hair. L'Arachel dismissed it, saying it was probably something he had inherited from a distant relative, citing ancestors in both she and Ephraim's families with brown hair. No one seemed to think a thing of it, but every time the child would turn his eyes on Rennac—those huge, peridot eyes, exactly like his mother's—Rennac felt more pain than he ever had before. He wanted to reach out and touch the child, to stroke its face and smile at him like Ephraim could. He wanted to kiss the top of his head as though he had a right to, and he wanted to watch him grow up._

_But he couldn't. He couldn't do any of that._

_Throughout the entire ordeal, the only person Rennac had ever suspected of knowing the truth was Dozla. The old man's attitude had changed drastically since little Prince Michael's birth, and Rennac could distinctly remember a number of occasions when the older man had looked from the child to Rennac and back again, and shaken his head in unrest. No longer did he slap Rennac on the back and erupt with booming laughter. Now he barely spoke a word to him._

xxxxxx

The baby's eyes opened slowly, his little pink nose wrinkling. His lips made an 'o' as he yawned quietly, and he blinked his wide, green eyes at his mother, and then at Rennac.

"Hi there," she whispered softly to the child, bending low to smile at him. Michael gave her a big, toothless grin, reaching his tiny hands up to grab at her hair, dangling like shimmering ivy. She chuckled at his actions, sitting him upright to face Rennac. He swallowed thickly.

"Look who's here," she cooed to the child, smiling between the two of them. "Remember him? It's Rennac!"

The child regarded him with his large eyes, unsmiling and puzzled. Rennac felt almost sick with a terrible combination of loneliness, heartbreak and rejection when the boy turned away, burying himself in his mother's bosom. He did not think he would ever forget how it felt to see his own son to turn away from him with dislike and lack of recognition. How it felt when his own child didn't know who he was.

"Oh, he's just shy," she sighed, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, Rennac."

"S'fine," he answered gruffly. "I…didn't expect him to recognize me anyway."

"He reminds me of you, you know," she said, tickling the boy's sides and causing him to give a muffled little shriek of laughter. He lifted his face from her chest and he was flashing that toothless grin of his again, and she was staring at him with a similarly bright smile, both of them unaware of the shocked man beside them.

"How so?" Rennac asked hesitantly, fearing the worst.

"He's a stubborn kid," she said fondly, bouncing the giggling boy on her knee. "Seems like he'll stop at nothing to get what he wants." She cocked an eyebrow at Rennac, followed by a wry smirk. "I imagine that once he can talk, he'll be trying to glean money from me all the time, too."

"What, so you think that's all I care about?" Rennac fired back teasingly, making her chuckle.

"One would assume so!" she said between peals of laughter. "It's not like you've given any evidence to the contrary!"

Rennac was about to give her an answering jibe, but then the tall figure of Ephraim appeared in the garden's entryway, his smile blinding when he saw his wife and what he thought to be his son.

"Ephraim," she breathed, and Rennac's heart twitched painfully at the loving way she sighed his name. He strode forward to deliver a swift kiss to her lips before stroking Michael's head.

"Seems like he gets bigger every day," Ephraim said, flashing Rennac a grin. He forced one back.

"Indeed," was all he said, turning his attention to a blooming sunflower, only thinking that he had to look away, that he had to think of _anything_ but this…

"Come," Ephraim said, taking her hand and coaxing his wife to follow him. She trailed after him to the doorframe before pausing to smile apologetically at Rennac.

"I'll speak with you some other time, yes?" she said softly. He could only give one stiff jerk of a nod in reply.

And as she turned to leave, her back to him, the baby boy in her arms looked at Rennac over her shoulder and raised one fat little hand. He curled his fingers up and down at him, waving goodbye. Rennac slowly raised his hand and did the same, feeling so cold as he watched Ephraim leave with the only two things in the world that he loved.

xxxxxx

**What can I say? Duchess likes angst. Anyway, yeah, I've been typing this on and off for a day or two, and imagine my shock when a story similar to this comes up only recently. It had a very similar premise (L'Arachel married to someone else, but having a baby with Rennac) though a few details were different. Anyway, just wanted to clarify that I didn't intentionally steal anyone's idea…I just really wanted to finish this story. Well, here it is, a one-sided Rennac/L'Arachel wrapped up in an angsty box. Reviews cure cancer!**


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